What's next? A specially designed CPU and memory to decode "cleaner sounding bits"?
[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvme-ssd-for-audiophiles
> pSLC mode: There is a special natural feeling, it becomes more smooth and calm, the thickness is slightly increased, and overall it is more resistant to hearing but still slightly dry."
Wow, that's incredible. Mmm yes, I love digitally encoded music to be slightly thicker and resistant to... hearing?
A/B testing audio reproduction components is extremely difficult. The human perceptual mechanism is a pattern detector, not a fine-grained measurement device — it's impossible to preserve sounds in memory long enough to make a informed distinction, all you have are the impressions the sounds left behind. You can improve with training, allowing you to recognize more patterns and thus capture better impressions, but only to an extent — recalling what something sounded like is still very lossy.
Combine that with human status seeking and the placebo effect and you get $2500 audiophile ethernet switches.
Source: I was a mastering engineer for a couple of years, and I had to help build a good monitoring environment for the studio. It was hard.
There is a very clear line separating expensive audiophile equipment that might have some hard-to-measure non-placebo benefits, and expensive audiophile equipment that cannot possibly do anything.
That line is the digital-analogic conversion. Any piece of equipment operating purely on digital information is either performing very straightforward redundancy checks and error correction, or it's snake oil. Tertium non datur.
I'll also say that it's not so much the hard-to-measure effects where you need to spend your time when pursuing accurate reproduction. Speakers have much poorer fidelity than anything else in the reproduction chain, and room acoustics matter a great deal (especially having a large enough room with high enough ceilings, to increase the ratio of direct sound coming from the speaker vs. reflected sound). The contributions of these factors are not small but they are are hard to understand, assess, and apply in practice.
The standard HiFi stance is that source should have no effect on DAC and vice versa, but some weird or old hardware does not do it right. Likewise DAC and amplifier shouldn't affect each other. Amplifier and transducer is a bit more complex due to analog electronics involved.
Of course the source can be garbage too (e.g. bad resampling or compression), but reasonable sources are all the same if digital. Except when we're talking vinyl or something, where there's another transducer and amplifier involved.
Why is it so hard to convince people that on the digital side of the equation, there's an objective right or wrong answer, and it's impossible to get any better than an exact copy of the bits?
They get all of that.
But could be bested by simply squeezing the bag with your dirty grubby hands.
Juicero is truly one of my favorite companies ever. The whole thing was a massive pile of extravagant hardware whose only reason for existence was to tell you "no, you cannot squeeze this particular bag of juice". It is the quintessential silicon valley echo chamber product. The fact that its founder went on to hawk "raw water" coming from spigots drilled into the hillsides along state highways only makes the story that much better.
The audiophile hardware on the other hand is being sold based on the promises that defy an objective physical reality.
I’m not a coffee “enthusiast” but we have a grinder at home, and I’m definitely not getting the same coffee as I did in the office when I used their grinders.
For these limited-run products, you're paying for the product development to a greater extent than you would for a product that sells in the millions. Software is very similar, someone could use Wordpress off the shelf, but they have a bunch of ideas for how their thing should be different, and so pay artisans $300 an hour to make their very own custom blog. The $1700 coffee grinder is the same effect at play.
This seems pretty subjective. iPhone does exactly same things (takes pictures, makes calls, runs apps) as a $50 no-name device running Android. Similarly, a bottle of Two Buck Chuck gets you drunk the same as a $25k Romanée-Conti.
The photo quality on the iPhone will be of objectively higher quality due to the larger, superior lenses. There's simply more light information to work with.
But yeah, homemade sugar solution and wine yeast would be your most efficient per dollar.
Replace «iPhone» with “Samsung Galaxy” and your argument stays true. It’s just that manufacturers created a market for phones with giant screens, 3+ cameras and CPUs that can fly you to Oort cloud.
Look I spent probably eight years deriding iPhones with some stupid sense of techno-superiority with my Android until I actually tried one. They are so much better holy shit, the speed of Safari alone is worth the price of admission.
A laptop can be bought by someone who says, "Ooh, Apple, new, shiny, cool," and the next person to buy the same laptop might say, "This is the objectively better device for my use case."
The most characteristic Apple customer experience is persuading themselves that they can learn to live without the feature deleted in the latest software update.
Apple might be qualitatively better than most, but I wouldn't call it quantitatively "insanely good". The product design often has major "bugs", like "you are holding it wrong" iPhone 4 or the macbook pro keyboards that stopped working a lot.
I myself had a screen replacement once on a mbp 2015 model because the "protective coating" peeled off... a known problem and Apple replaced it for free even tho I was a few months outside of my warranty.
And the power cable had a tendency to shed off the outer isolation layer and/or "fray", which is by no means a problem only I had given the many "how to fix" DIY youtube videos. Same thing with other cables, like the Lightning ones, I am told.
Cooling in the Intel macbook pros and airs also was a constant problem, and the engineering seems ridiculous at times[0].
That was the product design side... the manufacturing... not really what Apple does itself. The same manufacturers who work for Apple usually work for a lot of other companies as well. It might be that Apple insists on better quality (and maybe even pays a premium). But the iPhones I saw do not look like they had a lot better manufacturing quality than the phones I was using (I am not talking about better/more expensive components, that's a design decision).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vh-TdgfSNLs
Or more recently the 2019 MBP where plugging in the charger on the left side of the machine would cause it to thermal throttle whereas the right side was fine.
- “Luxury good” is objective. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxury_goods: “a luxury good (or upmarket good) is a good for which demand increases more than what is proportional as income rises, so that expenditures on the good become a greater proportion of overall spending” (luxury goods need not be expensive, either, especially if they only become useful in combination with other items that are expensive. Many people can afford to buy golf balls, but I think they still are luxury goods because golf clubs, club membership, and the ability to find time to play golf all are luxury goods)
- “Status symbol” is subjective, with groups of people deciding whether something is a status symbol. Status symbols need not even be expensive. Cultural or legal norms can prohibit the “don’t haves” from acquiring them (in Rome, not everybody was allowed to wear a toga, for example).
- “Overpriced” is subjective, with each individual deciding for themselves whether they think something is overpriced. Because of this, arguing whether an item _is_ overpriced is useless.
I see “overpriced” as 100% distinct from “has high profit margin” That’s objective, but a consequence of the value users see in a product (either as a functional item or as status symbol)
I don’t have the numbers, but chances are that iPhones are luxury goods. Whether they’re the other two depends on context. If you work at the Free Software Foundation, they may not be status symbols, for example.
Guess how well that phone sells?
Not very well. It sells so poorly that the manufacturer's announced they're going to stop making them. It's even from the same manufacturer but the paucity of its sales is what makes me believe a lot of people are iPhones for status symbols. I'm talking, of course, about the $400 iPhones SE (vs the iPhone 13 Pro which clocks in at $1,000). There are other differences too, but you will get made fun of, either to your face, or behind your back, for having a 'phone with a button'.
Just own up to the fact that you have a luxury phone.
You are allowed to aim a little higher than rice and beans for dinner without fear of it being called gourmet. It's been a decade since anyone cared what kind of phone you have. My four year old used iPhone with a cracked screen makes me look rich AF I'm sure.
What? We must be living in different worlds. Being made fun of is bizarre.
There’s an iPhone SE 2 as well. I have it.
Apple sells products which are, in the main, at very similar price points to its competition, and it has won because it simply. makes. better. products. I'm not sure why there is still delusional thinking about this—apparently the last 20 years have not proven the point well enough?
Must we mention monitor stands again?
Please.
It seems like this would be easier to sell as a line item on an already six figure home theater install (or seven figure house build), rather than individually. But I honestly have no idea.
[0] https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/62753-nvme-ssd-desi... [1] https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/62753-nvme-ssd-desi...
Or more generally Elitism. If there is much difference between the two, anyways.
Those folks would be embarrassed to mention those rooms contained things as goofy as this. It's excessive and unreasonable.
"A system deficit I recognized over the last several months was choral music, couldn't enjoy it when played as I was hearing wrong harmonics, kind of a glaze on the sound with poor word intelligibility regardless of whether the OS resided on Optane or in RAM. Had me agonizing over what could fix it...problem solved using the FEMTO NVMe drive"
There is a gigantic multi-trillion dollar industry built around convincing people to trade their money for shit they don't need. Advertising and marketing are diseases, and what you're looking at is a severe infection.
(The difference is that we're doing clever things with class D amplifiers to get the best sound possible out of a mobile phone, and charge a few dollars per chip. While it's technically a "specially designed CPU", really it's a proprietary DSP with the analogue front end on the same die)
Part of me envies the fools, everything must be magical for them.